Trip to India...

I have already written about my travel ordeal, so would be writing about the places I visited: Kanpur, Bangalore, Goa and Chennai.

KANPUR: For those of you who dont know me well enough, I spent the first 18 years of my life here (that does make me sound old). I have no particular affinity to place (yes i am heartless) and went only because my parents live there and to visit my old school(spent 14 years studying here).

This place never fails to shatter my notions about life. I arrived at Kanpur on 19th dec'06 only to find 12hour powercuts and a 2-3kbps connection called Reliance High-Speed Data Connection... which supposedly is some sort of improvement over dial-ups. One would think that I would be frustrated with no electricity and no internet... but I wasn't. Yes I didn't read Digg every 10 minutes, did not blog every week, did not check my mail every 5 seconds, did not watch videos online, or did not surf the 100+ channels we get on television... but it was really relaxing not to do all these things. After 1.5 years of running on the information highway, it was great to settle down for a month. This gave me ample of time to bond with people, talk at leisure with my family, make small talk with neighbors, give advice to wannabe engineers... without thinking about anything else in the back of my head. It was as if I had my garbage collection done.
To top it all, there was a reunion at my alma mater. It felt great to return to the place after 6 years and see some long forgotten faces.

I didn't do any touristy thing here. Living without a broadband internet in an old industrial city(350+ years old) was touristy enough for me.

GOA: What can I say... I spent the New Year here. It was crowded with people from all over the world. That, coupled with a warning from Al Quaeda added a few policemen to the already crowded place. The entries to the local clubs and pubs shot up by 600%, rendering them inaffordable to poor students like me. Rest assured, it was heaven... albeit a crowded one.

BANGALORE & CHENNAI: I did my engineering in Chickballapur, 50km from bangalore, so most of my friends are in Bangalore. Most of my friends from Kanpur have also relocated to this area, making it impossible for me to meet everyone of them. I ended up sending bulk mails on community websites, asking for phone numbers of people who want me to contact them. I called few of them and scheduled time slots to meet the rest of them. Unfortunately, I did not leave buffer time between the appointments so ended up saying "Hi" and "Bye" at the same time :( ... people need to be more punctual. I was in Bangalore for two days, in which I met my relatives, went to my undergraduate college to collect some papers, and met few of my friends. Trip to Chennai was relatively less stressful.. I just relaxed at my Aunt's place and spent my days there in front of her "wall mounted, 72 inch plasma display, home theater system".

All in all, my trip to India was what I wanted it to be... refreshing.

Sridhar's log... stardate 200701.01: Travel Ordeal

I am back. Its been ages since I blogged, sorted my mail, read blogs, chatted online, uploaded pictures... i.e. did anything on computer. Since the whole trip cannot be covered in totality in a single post, I'll posting multiple entries about it. This one is about my traveling experience... It is not for people with weaker hearts :P.


Although I booked my tickets a month early, I didn't look at the itinerary. I delegate work whenever possible, so assumed automatically that my agent (U.V. Travels) will plan the best itinerary for me. What happened next was a disaster:

• To India: I flew by Turkish Airlines. Without doubt, it is the most incompetent/inconvenient airlines I ever flew in and would ever fly. The in-flight entertainment systems belonged to the stone age. They had an old projector, which had three separate lights(RGB) that tried to create a pseudo color projection... it didn't go very far. The volume/channel controls were outdated and used some sort of mechanical dials.. none of them worked. Fast food was served on the plane... which was again a disaster because I am a vegetarian and my agent didn't seem to consider my food preferences while booking the tickets, but it was manageable. There was a layover in Turkey...for 14 hours!!! The hotel at the Airport has only 20 rooms, 5 reserved for the airlines... which are given to families and not single bachelors. I spent 14 hours sitting on a wooden chair/couch in a Starbucks cafe... It was more painful than it sounds. There was free wifi at the airport but no ports to plug in the power cord.
  

  
  The flight was till New Delhi, after which I had to take a connecting flight to Lucknow and then get a ride to Kanpur. At New Delhi airport, I realized that I had booked the flight for 19th jan rather than 19th December!! I took a train to Kanpur (paid another unscrupulous agent three times the fare)

• To Goa: I was supposed to fly to Bangalore, and go for a road trip to Goa with 8 other friends. The flight to Goa got canceled, had to rebook it at twice the price... small price to pay to meet priceless friends I thought. Reached Bangalore at around 7pm and had to leave for Goa at 9:00 pm. At 9:00pm I was informed that 6 of them had dropped due to some reason. Instead of 9, three of us went for the trip to Goa in a Tata Indica. We took NH 4a.. which despite being a National Highway was the worst road (no there was no road) I have ever seen... The engine cover was damaged, the axle bent and the wheel alignment destroyed. Fortunately there was a garage near the end of the road... The road trip took us over 15 hours...
  

• Back to US: Turkish Airways again... but a 19hr layover this time. Got accommodation in a lounge which made it more bearable. The flight from JFK to Syracuse got delayed by half an hour, then got delayed by another 3 hrs... and then finally got canceled. Took a bus to Syracuse and reached 6 hrs later than the estimated time.

Distance travelled:
By Air: 24000 km
By Road: 2000 km
By Rail: 2400 km

I can safely say that I traveled ALOT!!

Techies do suck at marketing...

I had to implement IPSec on Minix 3.1.2 for my Internet Security course this semster. Had it not been for the incident, I will be ranting about later in this entry, this entry would have been a detailed overview of my implementation.

We (grp of 2) were given about 5 weeks to implement the project. We finally nailed it and were very proud of our creation. Adding IPSec on the IP layer of a micro kernel based OS has its own kicks. Everything from designing, programming and debugging were harder than on a monolithic OS(I have done some on FreeBSD and Linux). Severe memory constraints (within Vmware) made the kernel to panic and, everyone with kernel development experience knows how hard it is to trace memory leaks. After painstakingly tracking and squishing the bugs, our product was ready for prime time.

For non CS people, we "Software developers/engineers/scientist" treat the software we create as a work of art... more like our own child. We get so absorbed in the beauty of our creation that we lose sight of the reality, which is what happened to me.

Dr Du has a different way of evaluating projects. He alloted just 15 minutes per group and never touched the keyboard or say anything. He asked us to step into salesman shoes and try selling the product to him. We on the other hand, full of ourselves, raring to show off our product, had 16 test cases (which were necessary to prove that our implementation was correct) and a presentation (of 4 slides.. just explaining the setup and robustness) all squeezed into 15 minutes. We couldn't have been more naive. We took around 8 minutes to explain the setup properly and then tried to show the test cases to him. Running 16 test cases in 5 minutes was clearly impossible...the inevitable happened,...we fumbled and the demonstration went downhill after that. Even though I might have made the best darn project in the class (yes I am egotistic and full of myself... i need to see a psychiatrist )... the world never got to see it.

I went through the three phases of denial, anger and acceptance. We were almost wailing like a kindergarten kid, that 15 minutes was not enough to sell a product we made in 5 weeks.... acceptance came later when we realized what went wrong. How much time would have been enough? 30 minutes? 1 Hr?... for all the 15 groups? Frankly, I could spend hours talking about the project. It is one thing to be enthusiastic about the work you do, but expecting others to show the same level of enthusiasm toward it is stupid and silly.

I guess I should sign up for an entrepreneurship course next semester....


PS: I will be leaving for India on 17th December. My Itenary will be available through Google Calendar. You can subscribe to it by clicking the button on the sidebar....

Extreme science? Extreme stupidity?...

This story made it to front page on digg.

The post explains ways of ingesting Methylene Blue in order to turn the color of your urine to blue. Apparently would also changes the color of your feces to green.

I know that imagination and human mind go hand in hand, but paying attention to the color of your wastes and consciously doing something to change it, is weirdest waste of time. Since the story received 850+ diggs, I assume that either I am living under the log for too long and changing the color is the new fad or mankind has entered some sort of reverse evolution cycle and are slowly transforming back to monkeys.

Rise and Fall...

If you have been in an airplane.. did you ever feel its speed? Well for those who haven't, the answer is no. Why? Because at that height, there is no frame/object of reference with which you can compare your speed. You can feel/estimate the speed of a train/automobile you are on by looking at the speed of the trees going by in the opposite direction and believe me you will be more thrilled driving a bike at 200 miles/hour than being in an airplane cruising at 700+ miles/hour. The increase in your speed does not thrill you after a certain point....

Our life follows the same rules. Here is how I relate to it..

• When I was a kid, I didn't study because I wanted to; but because my family wanted me to (come on, none of the kids want to go to school right!!). Although I had developed interest in science and computers at a very young age, yet it was not in competitive sense. I learnt what I loved and crammed what I was told to... life was a lot simpler. I simply judged my performance based on how happy my family was.
• Then came 11th and 12th standards and the mad race to join IIT, the temple of science and technology. It is considered the only goal in life by some 100,000 Indian students, only 4000 of whom make into the institution. I took part in this race too... Performance here was gauged purely by my relative performance amongst my peers. I was not very good at this game and lost it :( ... nevertheless I got into some college.
• Undergrad engg was a totally different experience. Since I was away from my family, there was no one to really feel happy for my achievements and feel sad for my failures, I had to do it myself. After a while, when you have your own fair share of successes and failures, you don't feel that adrenaline gush. You don't feel happy when you succeed and sad when you fail... you just feel kindda humble ( I am anything but humble :P) , enlightened and very very numb. I have seen a lot of people in this situation, they all react in strange ways... few of them gauge their performance by their relative success amongst their peers... this is healthy in the beginning until they start believing that the failure of their peers is their success. Most idiots you see in the corporate world believe in this philosophy. Others are not able to handle this and start smoking, taking drugs etc etc. Still others like me, continue working endlessly in search of excitement.
• Finally came the grad school. Although we all have a moderately socially active life, professionally we all are still loners. Everybody has his own battle to fight. This is where life gets really weird. Not only you can't use any methods that were used in undergrads(sadistic or otherwise) but also you cant make anyone to relate to your problems. Imagine being hurled into space with no heavenly bodies, just you and your peers, all going in different directions, thinking their's is the right one. Nobody really understands the trajectory of other's path (although there is a general idea amongst people going in the same direction)... And then when you are thus enlightened you realize that there is a race that can give you excitement. The race with yourself... and I think that is what keeps me going.

So in retrospect, how can I always succeed if I have race myself. Of course, I cant outdo myself everytime... I am not a superhuman, the key is to occasionally lower your standards so that you can defeat yourself and raise it when the decrease in performance goes down below the limit. The bottom line: sinusoidally change your standards to win everytime. This way life becomes more bearable, your brain is not rusted and you feel less frustrated at your failures. It is really important that you don't find an absolute goal but a relative one on the horizon, something you might never reach, or else your life will lose its meaning after reaching that goal.

Interestingly my finding is similar to that found in religious scriptures.